Young Marine guarded chaotic rooftop

By M.S. Enkoji -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Saturday, April 30, 2005

Marine Lance Cpl. Ken Crouse had often climbed to the roofs of the American Embassy compound to catch a breeze gliding by. Now, six floors up, on the roof of the tallest building in Saigon, Crouse easily spotted incoming explosions flaring in the night at Tan Son Nhut air base. The United States had started evacuating American civilians and South Vietnamese refugees there. "It was like a big fireball hitting, and I felt a sense of doom, my gosh, someone has been hurt," Crouse said.   Within minutes, a radio message confirmed the worst: two Marines in Crouse's guard detail, temporarily assigned to the air base, were dead. They were the last American soldiers to die in Vietnam. At 19, the Woodland High School graduate already had served in Okinawa, but less than three months into his posting at the embassy in Saigon, he realized this would end differently, with nauseating haste. By the time North Vietnamese forces surrounded Saigon and peppered the air with gunfire, the 43 Marine guards had abandoned their quarters several blocks from the embassy compound. Days blurred into nights as they worked a frenzied 24-hour schedule to strip the embassy.   "I lived on caffeine and hot chocolate," Crouse said.  Routinely assigned to the embassy's main gate, he was ordered to a room filled with file cabinets. "We were told to load the files on a pushcart, push it up to the roof and turn the stuff into powder," he said.   The names of South Vietnamese who had worked for the United States were in the files.  A giant shredding machine on the roof pulverized the files into paper ash blown into 55-gallon drums. When those were filled, the soldiers were told to let it blow off the roof.   As he worked, he couldn't hear or see beyond the block walls topped with concertina wire enclosing the compound. By now, thousands of Vietnamese clamored outside, arms outstretched toward the surest ride to freedom.  Once the bombing destroyed the airstrip for evacuations, the sky was lined with helicopters. Wave after wave touched down, first at the air base, then at the embassy - smaller CH-46s on rooftops; bigger CH-53s on the ground.   As the hours ticked down, Crouse channeled the stream of evacuees - Americans, French, South Vietnamese military families - into orderly huddles of up to three dozen on a rooftop of the compound, nudging them forward when the choppers touched down. For eight hours, as the panic-stricken milieu pressed around the compound, Crouse focused on those people.  Sometime in the early hours of April 30, the order came: Evacuate U.S. personnel only. The ambassador was gone. The only Americans left were Marines.   Crouse and his fellow Marines "buttoned down" the compound, barricaded entries, rolled down steel doors as they made their way to the roof for the last time. A full water truck crashed through into the compound, and Vietnamese flooded in. Marines dropped tear gas down stairwells behind them.   Crouse said he knew the intruders weren't the enemy, but he had orders: End the flow of refugees.  On the roof, the few dozen Marines waited. No more roar and whine from chopper blades.  "Part of the thing of being a young Marine is you really believe in your heart that everything will be fine," he said. "The entire Seventh Fleet was just off the coast a few miles. I was totally confident everything was going to be OK, we weren't going to be captured. We weren't going to be left behind."   The helicopters did come.   When it was his turn to lift off, Crouse - unshowered and sleepless for at least two days - looked down on a city under siege. Daybreak streaked the sky.